Saturday, May 17, 2014

An Opportunity to Acknowledge the Folly of War

Passed
three days after September 11, 2001, the Authorization for Use of Military
Force provided the President of the United States with the ability to “use all
necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or
persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or
persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against
the United States by such nations, organizations or persons”.

This
was strikingly broad language that opened the door to an endless and
ill-defined war in Afghanistan, which has since been expanded to Pakistan.In the hands of a criminal, lying Bush
administration, it opened the door to an illegal war of aggression in Iraq,
which killed over a hundred thousand people, destroyed the country’s
institutions and infrastructure, and transplanted Al Qaeda to a place where it
had hitherto not existed.

Subsequently,
this language has led to the indiscriminate use of drones to murder U.S. and
foreign citizens without due process.It
has the United States fighting shadow wars in Somalia, Yemen, and other parts
of Africa and the Middle East that our security state won’t even tell us about.It helped to lay the groundwork for torture,
abductions, rendition, and a host of other activities all associated with our
War of Terror, none of which have made our country safer in the long-term, and
most of which have visited horrific forms of barbarism on the people of other
countries.

In
other words, our representatives, almost down to an individual, thought that
just three days after an attack on the United States they possessed all of the
information they needed in order to decide that the best thing to do was to
abdicate their responsibility to safeguard the public interest and instead
grant the President the power to wage war whenever, wherever, and however he
saw fit.

There
were no questions, there were no qualifications, and there was no sense that
perhaps meeting violence with violence, and acting on emotion rather than analysis,
could be dangerous.

There
was no interest in calibrating a response to the attacks based on any
understanding of their motive.There was
no thought given as to what it might mean to launch a war unhinged from our professed
values and un-moored from the restraints characteristically placed on the use
of military violence by the state.

Twelve
days after the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., Barbara
Lee explained her vote in Congress, arguing that to vote yes would have
been to write a “blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the
Sept. 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long
term foreign policy, economic, and national security interests, and without
time limits…..The Congress”, she maintained, “should have waited for the facts
to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our
action”.

On the day she opposed the
bill, Lee pleaded that “some of us must urge the use of restraint.Our country is in a state of mourning.Some of us must say, let’s step back for a
moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications
of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control”.She closed her brief remarks by quoting a
clergyman who had urged that “as we act, let us not become the evil that we
deplore”.

Nearly
as many U.S. citizens have died in Afghanistan as were killed on 9/11.Far more U.S. citizens were killed in Iraq
than during the 9/11 attacks, without even counting the military contractors.And well over 100,000 people have been killed
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other, un-acknowledged
fronts of the War of Terror that has brought so little in terms of security,
peace, or happiness to our country or any other part of the world.

Our
military, at the behest of bloodthirsty neocons and with the backing of our
supine representatives, has whirled through these countries with no regard for
the transformations that bombing campaigns, kidnappings, torture prisons, or
use of mercenaries will wreak on the lives of the people who we bomb, conquer,
and leave to pick up their shattered lives.

We
have deployed force with no regard for how it will contribute to terrorism that
is driven by discontent, alienation, and the economic struggles of youth around
the globe who feel that violence is their best way out.

Today,
a few members of Congress are laying the ground for the repeal of the
Authorization for Use of Military Force.Repeal would not undo any of the damage that our precipitate and
thoughtless actions unleashed on the world.It would not mark a significant shift in the outlook of the executive
branch or likely, in the conduct of our foreign policy.

But
it would suggest that we might be—over a decade on—beginning to learn from our
folly, and that we understand that writing blank checks for the use of violence
is not a moral, appropriate, or productive way of governing our relations with
our fellow global citizens.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.